A phone wallpaper made as a request from a friend.

Disclaimers:

• I traced the soundtrack cover of La vaguelette for the bust but I drew in the rest using references from images of her 3D models, at a time when her character was newly released.

• All of this was hand-drawn.

• I did not sell this piece; I made this as an exercise and gifted it to the friend who gave me the prompt, who plays Genshin Impact.

(c) All rights reserved to HoYoverse for the character, background, and art style.

Made with Photoshop.

Interested? ✉ stefanypaulinemoyco@gmail.com

The Process

Sketch

I sketched in the pose, keeping in mind the vibes my friend wanted, using a scene from the story teaser as a reference.

Not satisfied with how the hands looked in the initial sketch, I took a photo of myself for reference and redrew them, adding the "vision" Furina was about to receive.

Linework

With this, I set to work on the lineart. Not being confident I could freehand the style used on the video and wanting to make this faster, I traced the cover like so.

Obviously, Furina's arms weren't like that in the original, so this is where I started using references, ranging from her official art to turnarounds of her 3d model to fill in the gaps while following the linework used on the cover.

Since her character was just newly released at the time, her clothes were not yet included at Games Fashion Archive and official images of her were few and far between, so I scoured the web for references.

With that, after asking what my friend preferred, I colored in the linework, using the cover and music video as reference.

Color

Colors were straightforward as I just color-picked what was on the cover and music video, and used my references to inform my decisions for the rest.

Background

With that done, I proceeded to background.

I asked my friend what he wanted, giving him several options based on the backgrounds seen on the music video. He then sent me what he picked.

Again, to make the process faster, I just traced the background while modifying it to better make sense of the scene.

With this, the illustration was completed.

Thoughts

I hesitated on posting this piece because I know tracing is frowned upon by the art community, but I'm really proud of how this turned out so I wanted to post this. I understand there are more beneficial ways of learning an art style (what I did take away from the exercise was how to vary my linework).

However, I would like to ask for your feedback on the matter.

Is this controversial? Would being transparent on the fact I traced change the merit of an artwork? Can this be included in a portfolio?